The current LRB has a wonderful example of one style of academic review: the long essay outlining the book that ought to be written about the subject, concluded by a paragraph dismissing the work under review. But what a paragraph!

André Burguière does not want to admit this. For him Annales remains a cause to fight for. But his book will do the cause no good at all. It is written seemingly without any knowledge of the wider historiography. Lutz Raphael’s Die Erben von Bloch und Febvre, the best and most comprehensive account of the school, is mentioned in the bibliography, but there is no sign that Burguière has read it. Self-important, pompous, pretentious, solipsistic, often obscure, sometimes barely coherent, his book seems to address itself only to those in the know. The translation by Jane Marie Todd renders all these faults with exemplary accuracy.

I had to call Marek Kohn the other day, because I was thinking about the Chief Rabbi’s eugenics, and this led me to reread A reason for everything. It really is good. The discussion of Bill Hamilton in particular is extremely subtle and penetrating. All of the faults and confusions are dissected: “for him the hospitals came to represent the inexorable modern menace that others see in immigrants or surveillance cameras”. At the same time, Kohn admires and understands the achievements, and sees all the ways in which Hamilton did in fact function emotionally and socially. This is how pop science ought to be written.

I really like the idea of MS OneNote, and find it very useful for scribbling ideas into and recording interviews. It also has exemplary synchronisation. But it is a pig to use as a repository for web clips, unless you also use IE. There is a firefox clipper but it’s slow, ugly and obtrusive. There’s no quick easy way to tag what has been clipped or to get an overview, later, of subject lines. There is an API, but it demands that the programmer read and write long strings of XML to accomplish even the simplest tasks. So, while it would be perfectly possible for someone fluent in Javascript and XML to write firefox extension that clipped at usable speed, that person is not me, and certainly no one has done it. Really irritating. I don’t doubt that the people who work for microsoft find it quite easy to program extensions in C# or whatever. But even inside MS there aren’t many people doing it, and I suspect that it will quietly wither away because, although good software, it’s just too hard to extend. And any type of intelligent dustbin program has to talk easily to everything else on the machine. That’s half the point.

This is a quick note, really for the benefit of Google, to point out that Evernote, which is growing more and more popular, was in important respects much better in version 2, now neither sold nor supported, than in the various versions three that are now available on all sorts of platforms. In fact the software changed so much between the two versions, both in what it does and what it’s trying to do, that it’s best to think of them as almost entirely different. Continue reading →

Tomas Tranströmer is generally considered Sweden’s best living poet. He presents horrible difficulties in translation. He writes an exceptionally pure, cold Swedish without frills. It’s very hard to specify why it’s not prose but you would have to be deaf blind and dumb not to recognise it as poetry.

Mention of blindness brings up another problem. I find that he is a tremendously visual poet. To read him is to see what he describes. But how can this translate to people who have never seen a Swedish landscape, and don’t know what the words refer to? That’s not a question I can honestly answer, since I can’t unsee.

In any case, I have been reading the Scottish poet Robin Robertson’s “versions” of Tranströmer in The Deleted World. It’s a slim volume that would have been slimmer had it been more faithful. It’s full of bits that just aren’t in the original, most egregiously here.

A phone call spilled into the night and glittered on the country-side and in the suburbs.
After, I slept uneasy in the hotel bed.
I was like the needle in the compass that an orienteer carries, runningthrough the woods with a thundering heart.

Now this has one deviation I consider unavoidable: “thundering” for “bultande”, which means “thumping” or “banging” – but you can’t speak of a heart “banging” in English: it’s an altogether too percussive activity, whereas hearts bultar a lot in Swedish. In English, hearts do thump, but it has quite the wrong sound. So, “thundering” which at least locates the central consonant cluster where it should be in the mouth. Otherwise, it’s just about word for word except some minor and unavoidable changes of word order and article (“the compass”, “an orienteer” for the original “a compass”, “the orienteering runner”).

Here is Robertson:

“Calling Home”

Our phonecall spilled out into the dark
and glittered between the countryside and the town
like the mess of a knife fight.
Afterwards, all night jittery and spent in the hotel bed,
I dreamt I was the needle in a compass
some orienteer bore through the forest with a spinning heart.

Dreams? Spinning? Knife fight? Where did they come from? More broadly, I don’t think the original poem necessarily describes a quarrel. I have had non-fighting phone conversations in hotel rooms that left my heart banging through the night like an exhausted orienteer’s.

I don’t want to be needlessly picky. Tranströmer is difficult because he boils his language down to the bones, and English has a different skeleton. These are clearly labelled “versions”, not “translations”. Some of Robertson’s word choices a just exactly right: “The world would be deleted” for “skulle världen utplånas”.

This is part of what may become a sort of series; notes on the difficulties presented by some of the books I am reading. In particular, they are examples of the discomfort I feel when I know what something means but I don’t know how to translate it.

Tove Jansson is a writer who ought to be easy. Her meaning is always clear and she uses simple declarative sentences that consist of nothing but the proper words in their proper places. But the balance and rhythm of her sentences is almost impossible to reproduce. They just take a different route to their end than is possible in English. How to translate this into English, a language which wouldn’t let you put words in the same order, even if they had the same sounds?

I know that her stories and her characters carry over. But there is a rhythm and a tension to her style that just doesn’t. Swedish is a stiff and rather weighty language: English is by contrast light and floppy. Trying to preserve the rhythm of Swedish in English feels like trying to fly cast with string.

Here are the last paragraphs of “Fair Play”, in Swedish, with the tricky bits marked up:

Here’s a more or less literal translation, written out anachronistically after the notes that follow it.

Jonna burst out: “Of course I understand!” and she threw herself into a long and eager disquisition on the importance of illustration, the painstaking labour, the concentration, the need to be undisturbed so as to get a good piece of work done.
Mari listened without attention; a world of bold thoughts began to form: the possibility of a solitude all her own in peace and anticipation, almost a kind of delight which you can allow yourself when you are blessed with love.

Perhaps because I am not a native Swedish speaker I find that even the simplest words in it are, so to say, unclichéd, unknotted and spread out for my admiration when they are well used. “Omsorgsfull” translates almost directly as “careful” but when I hear “careful” I hear its primary meaning as an injunction: “Be careful!” or “Watch out”; what I would, as a parent in Swedish, have expressed as “Akta!”; whereas the Swedish word has for me connotations of taking care, of patient painstaking lovingness.

Utredning is an enquiry; usually used of a government or other official enquiry. In this context I suppose I would use “disquisition”; the point, of course, is that Jonna is flung away from the moment of emotional communication: what she “of course understands”, which is that she is free to go to Paris and talks instead of something “officially” admissible. I have no idea how to pack all that into one word of English.

An äventyrlig tänk­barhet is more obviously difficult, and possibly easier. It’s a bold, or an adventurous, thinkableness. It’s what stout Cortez saw. “A world of brave new thoughts” perhaps. Nah, that’s wrong. It’s a very Mumin moment, though this is not of course a Mumin book.

And then of course there are the repeated alliterations of the next sentence: egen ensamhet i frid och förväntan, though the last two es of alldeles also belong in this run of sound. The sense is clear: “a solitude of her own, in peace and anticipation”. And it’s fine. But there is still something missing.

That’s taken me about an hour: time well spent, but hardly well paid. I feel a weight of responsibility for all the translators on whom I must sit in judgment over the next two months.

For reference, here’s Thomas Teal’s version:

“Of course I do!” Jonna burst out, and she launched into a long, earnest discussion of the importance of illustration, the painstaking labour, the concentration, the need to be undisturbed if you’re going to do your best work.
Mari was hardly listening. A daring thought was taking shape in her mind. She began to anticipate a solitude of her own, peaceful and full of possibility. She felt something close to exhilaration, of a kind that people can permit themselves when they are blessed with love.

“Peaceful and full of possibility” preserves the alliteration very nicely and brings out the sense.

The PDP-11/70 on which the Research Unix system is installed is a 16-bit word (8-bit byte) computer with 768K bytes of core memory; the system kernel occupies 90K bytes about equally divided between code and data tables. This system, however, includes a very large number of device drivers and enjoys a generous allotment of space for I/O buffers and system tables; a minimal system capable of running the software mentioned above can require as little as 96K bytes of core altogether. There are even larger installations; see the description of the PWB/UNIX systems [4, 5], for example. There are also much smaller, though somewhat restricted, versions of the system [6].
Our own PDP-11 has two 200-Mb moving-head disks for file system storage and swapping. There are 20 variable-speed communications interfaces attached to 300- and 1200-baud data sets, and an additional 12 communication lines hard-wired to 9600-baud terminals and satellite computers. There are also several 2400- and 4800-baud synchronous communication interfaces used for machine-to-machine file transfer. Finally, there is a variety of miscellaneous devices including nine-track magnetic tape, a line printer, a voice synthesizer, a phototypesetter, a digital switching network, and a chess machine.

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is investigating a story that Louise sent me about the International Society of Arctic Char fanatics, and their struggles against some horrible development in Scotland. Better yet, I could be fishing for char (röding) because despite living for years in the southern reaches of countries where they are found I have only ever caught one in my whole life, and that was in Lake Bohinj, in Slovenia, where I didn’t know they existed until one grabbed my fly.

Instead, though, the bits of the next two months that aren’t spent doing journalism will be taken up with reading. I am a judge this year for the Bernard Shaw prize for translation out of Swedish to English, and they have just sent me the entries:

Apologies for grotty cameraphone picture: never mind the quality, marvel at the height.

I’ve been running both the laptop and the desktop on various flavours of Ubuntu for about six months now, which is time enough to get an informed opinion. This wasn’t a deliberate decision. I started with Xubuntu on the laptop, an IBM X40, because I was sick to death of XP’s erratic performance when switching between wireless networks and the a 3G dongle. It would interrupt me every two or three minutes with a demand or suggestion that it switch to one or the other, and in the Guardian’s confused wifi environment this was intolerable. Continue reading →